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Strategy Guide Company Prima Games Is Shutting Down (kotaku.com)
Prima Games, the publishing company that has printed video game strategy guides since it was founded in 1990, is shutting down. "The label will no longer publish new guides starting now, and it will officially shutter in the spring," reports Kotaku. From the report: Thanks to the rise of sites like GameFAQs -- and major gaming publications like IGN commissioning their own online guides, which bring in monstrous amounts of traffic -- print strategy guides have struggled for years now. In 2015, Prima purchased and swallowed its biggest competitor, BradyGames, and has been consistently churning out guides for both print and the web, but it wasn't enough to survive what the company called "a significant decline" in the world of print video game guides.
I'm surprised Prima lasted as long as they did. GameFAQs and sites dedicated to games (now replaced by wikis, as you mention) have been around a long time, and everybody's been on the 'net for over a decade. I've never bought a print guide in my life, and I only own a few commercial PDF guides because they came with the game(s).
One of the best guides I ever read was the Prima one for Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. Since Uru was a meta, alternative reality game taking place in the real world -- in which the original Myst games were put out by Cyna to help spread the word about the "real" D'ni civilization discovered underground in New Mexico -- the Prima guide was written as a completely first person account, leading others through the journey that the writer (a "former games guide writer") had taken.
It was really rather imaginative and very well done... And remember, this was 2003, before some of these other meta-tricks became more common place. RIP Prima :/
https://www.amazon.com/URU-Beyond-Primas-Official-Strategy/dp/0761544704/
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Yes, I got stuck a lot. All the time, in fact. But if I had a glossy guidebook to consult each time, I'd beat the expensive game in no time. What's the point of that? Is a game purchased in order to beat it as quickly as possible? Anyone who does that has completely missed the point. Plus the guidebook cost *extra* money, so you were wasting even more money to get less challenge/enjoyment from the main product...
If you have never walked around helplessly in Hyrule for weeks, looking for that item to get you past an obstacle, you also won't know the pleasure of eventually finding it. That was the actual game -- the feeling of a vast virtual world where you are thrown in and have to attempt to figure it out. Not just looking it up in some book or digital text file.
There were even hugely popular "cheating devices" that went even further, by allowing you to get unlimited lives/continues/power/HP/ammo, etc. I cannot understand the mentality of people who bought and used those things.
What they were doing wasn't working, so what does that suggest? Oh, yes, of course, let's buy someone else who is doing the same thing we are but obviously worse than we are in the hopes that we'll now be able to, ummmm, what exactly?
I'm sorry, but I have zero sympathy for them. Ten years ago I might have had a smidge. Just a smidge then. But today... if they hadn't realized before now that print strategy guides wasn't a sustainable business, then their "strategy" guides aren't something I want to read anyway. In fact, I'd just go ahead and flush anything they've done in the last decade in the vein of "strategy" at all, because they obviously aren't very good at that.
Actually, I take back what I originally wrote. Brady had to have been doing something right, because at least they managed to find someone willing to pay real money for them. I want to find one of /their/ old strategy guides.
I bought a Sim City 2000 strategy guide book years ago. I'm talking, well, nigh on 20 years ago. It was, I think, the last one I bought. I don't regret it, in fact I might now try and find it just for the nostalgia. But ya, even then the writing was on the wall.
I-D-10-T error.
I'm not sad to see them go. I'm excited to see if we can make it so there's never a "guide damn it" moment in games again where the programmers deliberately hide shit so that the only way to know about it is to buy the fucking guide. Shit that started with Nintendo Power and "Milon's Secret Castle". Fuck that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...